I am the Bat

Late to the party again. Last year, shortly after the hotly anticipated release of Rocksteady's sequel, I got the idea to see what all the fuss was about and fired up Arkham Asylum. Truth be told, I'd picked the game up months before on a Steam sale, but my first attempt to play the game had been stymied by mouse and keyboard control frustrations. So I reinstalled, fussed about for a while reassigning controls (nothing should ever be mapped to the middle mouse button), and donned the cape and cowl. Arkham Asylum surpassed my expectations and lived up to the hype. I was amazed by the depth of the experience, the thoughtful touches (like a codex that gives you a complete background on every character), and the simple yet addictive combat. Context sensitive controls were an occasional frustration, although when compared to the Assassin's Creed series I think Rocksteady put much more consideration into their interface. I enjoyed the story and stuck around to complete all the optional content. Pretty high praise from a gamer who often doesn't finish games at all. Coming straight off my marathon Batman session last November, I was excited to get my hands on the sequel, Arkham City. Christmas was around the corner, and sure enough, the game appeared under the tree. Batman lost an important battle right away, though: the battle for my time. With a rapidly growing list of new games to play, Batman took his place at the back of the line, and was subsequently forgotten. Until now. Batman is back in a big way. One thing you hear in almost every review is that these games give you an incredible feeling of being Batman. I find myself muttering, "I am the night," quietly to the monitor as I sneak up behind clown themed thugs. I thought Arkham Asylum had gone out of the way to include just about every villain. It turns out I don't know the first thing about Batman's hit list. Arkham City is big, but not in the same way that Grand Theft Auto IV or Skyrim are big. AC's main map encompasses a few square blocks of city with about a dozen enterable structures, but they tend to be rather densely packed with secret objectives, side missions, and (of course) plenty of enemies to beat to a pulp. While Batman may have come off as more static than stoic in Rocksteady's last tour of duty, be prepared to marvel at the license they've taken with the iconic comic characters this time around. Batman may talk about being ready to break his "one rule" in his big screen adventures, but by the midway point, you'll really start to wonder how far the caped crusader is willing to go to set things right in Arkham City. Rocksteady pushes Batman to the brink, and they weave a tale that lives up to the potential.

Cloudy with a chance of DRM

When last I posted, I discussed the upcoming re-release of Final Fantasy VII for PC. After a false start and some terrible PR, Square finally opened sales on Tuesday morning without a whisper of fanfare.

So, what do fans get for their $10 this time around?

On the positive side, the new release supports high resolution displays and gives players to option to fix the aspect ratio in software if they choose. At higher resolutions, previously obscured details on the 3D characters are visible, for good or for ill. The FMV sequences have also been cleaned up significantly (though I cannot even guess how this was accomplished), and look surprisingly sharp on high resolution displays. However, because the backgrounds are 2D mattes, there is no enhancement to the environments, which often seem pixelated and blurry compared to the characters. Controls are fully customizable from the game launcher, with decent support for both keyboard and gamepad configurations. Small, but appreciated improvements, to be sure.

Less exciting is the draconian DRM Square has forced upon us. Bafflingly, not only does this title require online activation, but Square has opted for the most hated of DRM techniques: limited installations. Each purchase of the game is tied to a key which may be activated only three times. Further activations require the player to contact Square support by telephone. Also, despite boasting recoded and improved sound configuration, Square has included the lowest fidelity music we have ever seen in this game. The music seems to be similar to the horrific midi tracks from the 1998 release, but now is also missing most of the bass "instruments" from those midi files. Fortunately, the community has already come to the rescue, releasing instructions for replacing the music files with the more appealing PSX originals (and hopefully soon some orchestral versions!)

The bizarre features announced a month ago are here as well. While cloud saves may be useful to some small percentage of the community who either switch platforms (an eventuality severely limited by the activation restrictions) or who simply experience hard disk crashes (not a frequent enough experience to worry about), the achievements seem pointless, especially considering that they exist only within the game and are awarded for mundane tasks.

With all these flaws, you might think twice before dropping the money on this game, especially if you have purchased it before. My advise would be that if you have the game on your PS3, or if you have a still-functioning PSX disc version and a system that will play it, you can just move right along. But if you have been wrestling with the 1998 PC release, or simply do not have a working version of the game, this is the your best bet. All the fluff and graphical nonsense aside, Final Fantasy VII has remained an iconic game for good reason. I think I'm starting to get a better handle on why exactly that is, and I'll have more to say on the subject tomorrow.

Final Fantasy 7, Again

On Wednesday, Square Enix announced another re-release for Final Fantasy VII, this time for the PC. The announcement boasts a few features nobody ever asked for (Achievements and "Cloud saves", har har) and "optimized performance", which we couldn't possibly need to play a PlayStation 1 game on the PCs of 2012, but there is no mention of any improvements.

After 15 years and more than a dozen separate releases, Final Fantasy VII still carries around some shocking bugs. The one that leaps immediately to mind is that the Magic Defense stat is completely non-functional. Oops! This is only one of several dozen glitches and translation errors which have haunted the game for the better part of two decades. I don't mind Square milking their aging cash cow for all she's worth, but its past time these issues got a little love.

For that matter, if Squenix wants to wring every last dime from the project, maybe they ought to consider a cheap graphical update for modern systems. I'm confident that both the PS3 and PC platforms can handle rendering the cinematic quality character models in real time, replacing the blocky, featureless map models of 1997. And that's a minimalist approach. For a tiny investment, they could replace every character and enemy in the game with a spiffy new high detail model based on the original design. Or, for a more significant amount of work, they could re-imagine the entire project in the graphics of 2012 and sell millions more copies of the same game.

Even if Square is dedicated to leaving the game as-is (maybe they're concerned about their "artistic integrity"), there are unexplored and completely ripe markets for a re-release that make much more sense. I carry a Motorola Razr Android phone with me everywhere I go. It boasts hardware that absolutely dwarfs the capabilities of the original PlayStation. I'd pay $20 for Final Fantasy VII on my phone and call it a great deal. Hell, I'd switch to an iPhone if they made it available on that platform.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, "WTF Square?!?"